Tag Archives: Elections

Why the hell should I write about the counter-revolution? I opened this blog in order to write about the revolution, about the people awakening from decades of enslavement and finding their voice, revealing their power, struggling for a better world? And those bastards have a whole pack of media wolves writing for them, all well paid and exercised in praise and flattery…

But writing about the revolution is telling a story. The dedicated writer should bring the story as it is. The murderers, the top brass, those that kidnapped a whole nation to rob it and torture it, are now the heroes of the day. So I ought to give them their share in this blog also.

Every story-teller or movie director will tell you that there is no great story without real bad guys. The Arab Spring was almost lost in the dust after the first bunch of bad guys hurried to run away from the scene. Now they come back, with their ugliest possible distorted faces, General Al-Sisi ordering the shooting of demonstrators all around Egypt and President Assad grinning in friendly TV talk shows while gassing and bombing the children of Syria.

Simply Bad

Many of us had the first smile of relief after the Egyptian coup when we heard that the Muhammad Morsi, the first elected president of Egypt, is going to be charged with “conspiring with Hamas”. It is terrifying to see how the military dictatorship in Egypt is waging a war on the encircled Palestinian enclave of Gaza, cutting the tunnels that were its lifelines, but at least we can say it is the devil we know.

Just as I came to write this post, I found Amos Harel’s article in “Ha’aretz” (sorry, but only in Hebrew) titled: “The coup in Egypt renewed the romance between Cairo and Jerusalem”. It tells the story how Israel’s intervention helped the Egyptian generals to achieve US support for their coup. How the top brass in Egypt is eagerly cooperating with Israel to defame the Palestinians as terrorists and to tighten the siege of Gaza. How Israel encourages the military campaign of the Egyptian army against the Bedouin of Sinai and enjoys its fruits. How the newly tightening counter-revolutionary alliance between Egypt’s generals, the Gulf kings and emirs and the king of Jordan is turning the regional balance of power again in Israel’s favor.

The eruption of joy from the Assad bloody regime in Syria at the coup in Egypt and what they saw as the demise of their erstwhile foes, the Muslim Brothers, completes the picture of the forces of evil taking center stage in the region. No wonder the US now declares that it has no intention to topple Assad and that it aims at “political solution” in Syria – probably looking for a Syrian Al-Sisi to take the reign and prevent the Syrian people from winning the liberty fruits of their heroic struggle and endless sacrifices.

They were there all the time

While now the picture becomes clear and simple with the bad guys taking center stage – we should not be simple-minded ourselves. The forces of evil didn’t come from nowhere – they were there all the time.

The current cruelty rivals (and builds upon) the preceding stupidity of the analysis of the crisis in Egypt before the coup by many respected revolutionaries and educated bourgeois commentators.

The main proposition was that after Morsi became president we were witnessing a “power grab” by the Muslim Brothers, and that the popular protest was a result of the “failures” of the Muslim Brother’s government to deliver on its promises.

This type of analysis ignores the main fact that the change of the head of government didn’t change the regime, and that Mubarak’s old oppressive Deep State continued to be the main organized force in the country and kept its holds on most organ of government, first and foremost all the organs of oppression: the army, the police, the security services, etc.

One small example was the strike by the police force for different excuses, intentionally encouraging a surge in crime and lost of personal security. When the Muslim Brothers called on people to organized citizens’ committees to keep order in the street, liberal politicians and media cried foul, warned against the establishment of “party militias” and demanded to keep the monopoly of the state on law enforcement.

The Judiciary played a major role in “constitutionally” sabotaging any attempt at democratization – dissolving the democratically elected parliament and preventing any orderly transfer from the interim period to normalization.

In the elections to the presidency, the representative of the old regime was not far from winning the second round against Morsi. It proved that the revolution didn’t really touch the lives of many Egyptians. It also showed that for much of the petty bourgeoisie the old regime seemed as a lesser evil than the rule of the Muslim Brothers. Most of the political opposition became choir boys for the old regime. Their last attempt at democratic contest was the referendum about the new constitution in December 2012, in which they mastered only 36% of the vote. After this defeat they were determined not to face the vote again – and opened the campaign that led to the military coup.

Always with us

The schism between changing the top of the regime and changing the over base over society and the country as a whole goes with us all over history.

It is only in the last couple of years that the elected president of Turkey can go to sleep pretty sure that he will not awake to the sight of soldiers surrounding his bed. It required the systematic routing of the army from coup plotters over many years to achieve this.

It took another elected president, Hugo Chavez, five years in office before he could lay his (democratically elected) hands on Venezuela’s oil revenues and use them to promote social equality. It was possible only after a mass uprising aborted an army coup and released the captive Chavez, and after a long strike and sabotage campaign enabled the government to restart oil production under a new management.

In the big Russian revolution, after years of civil war and famine, it was mostly the old Tsar bureaucracy that took control of the communist party as well as the soviet state, establishing a system of class privilege and dictatorial rule over the toiling masses.

In China, after the communist party took power in 1949, Mao initiated the Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976) to force deep social change and uproot the grip of the old elite. It was a long and disruptive process – and its contribution to the current success of China is still a matter of dispute.

While at the head of the capitalist system stands not the 1% but a fraction of it that reaps the vast majority of the fruits and holds the reigns of control, this system of exploitation couldn’t exist without the complicity of wide sectors of society. It is the owners of small property that are afraid for their small gains for which they toiled all their lives and are ready to kill to keep them. It is the serving classes that are used to obey their masters for small comforts and privilege. It is the fear of the organized worker from the desperate unemployed and the hungry immigrant. It is the macho of the man that wouldn’t like to see his fellow women coming out free and equal. It is racism, sectarianism, ignorance, self interest and fear that keeps us all enslaved.

In Defense of the Beduin

While you are all used to defend the Palestinians, the ultimate victims of the Imperialist Zionist Hegemony, while most of you may be civilized enough to denounce the massacre of peaceful demonstrators in Cairo and Alexandria, even though they are Muslims, I’m afraid that nobody will speak out against the military campaign waged against the Beduin in Sinai.

So, please, ask yourself how comes the Beduin population became “radicalized”? If there is any extremism involved, it is first and foremost the extreme poverty, neglect, discrimination and oppression of the Beduin population by the Israeli and Egyptian governments. (Yes, many of the Beduin in Sinai were victims of the Israeli Ethnic Cleansing that expelled them from their lands in Palestine.)

Now it serves well the purpose of the Egyptian military dictatorship, like it serves the Assad family and many other enemies of the people, to pose as defenders of humanity and the west against Islamic extremism.

They are not interested to solve the social problems that are the source of the struggle but to carry on and intensify the war of oppression against the people.

Looking at the images of people escaping the Al-Fath mosque in Cairo today (Saturday 17.8.2013) under constant police fire, I stare at the terrified faces of those people, some of them injured, many lost friends and relatives in the massacre. I imagine that I see myself there, between them, running down the street.

But you’re not a Muslim Brother, some of you will wonder. But I do stand for principle. My land was not confiscated, but I was demonstrating in the day of the land in March 30, 1976. This is not a problem.

What I ask myself is whether I would dare to go to Rabaa Al-Adawiya while I knew that the army was preparing for a massacre. But, I encourage myself, on October 2, 2000, when we heard that the police shot at our friends in Um Al-Fahm, Nazareth, Arabeh and Sakhnin, killing some of them, we sat in the middle of Al-Jabal Street in Haifa and refused to move, even as the police were approaching to attack us. So, maybe, you could find some people of democratic and leftist principles in Cairo’s streets, ready to die with the Muslim Brothers to defend Egypt’s democracy and to oppose tyranny.

It is time to remember that eternal saying of the struggle for liberty: “If you’re not ready to die for freedom, you don’t deserve to live free”. It doesn’t intend to prevent the right for free life from anybody, no matter how coward or indifferent he or she may be. It comes to express the simple historic fact, that without the bravery and sacrifices of millions of freedom loving people we would all be slaves up to this day and till the end of history.

Basic Values

In these days of division, confusion, wild propaganda and outright terror, you should stick to the most basic values.

For me the killing of protesters is a clear red line. The Egyptian military regime clearly initiated and organized a massive massacre of peaceful demonstrators in order to consolidate its illegally acquired power.

And, by the way, any people that come to cheer up when the army or the police are shooting people in the streets are, to my taste, a despised lynch mob. If there happen to be many of them it is just a sad observation about the fragility of the Human soul – it has nothing to do with revolution, democracy or whatever.

Humanistic values should come first. They are the basic attitude, motivation and moral grounds behind any struggle for freedom and justice. Politics should come at the end of it – as calculated means to achieve goals. But when your politics loses its humanistic moral grounds it becomes a corrupt grab for personal or clique power.

Respect for the other is at the base of all Human values. How can anybody call himself a Democrat, a Liberal, a Leftist, a Socialist, a Revolutionary or pretend to belong to any other tradition that claims to speak for Human Rights and Dignity and support the rule of the army that kills demonstrators in the streets?

Democracy is at the Heart of the Struggle

The martyrs (Shuhada) of Rabeaa Al-Adawiya and all those shot demonstrating in Egypt over the last month and a half are martyrs for democracy. They demonstrated because the elected government of Egypt was removed by a military coup, not in order to promote any special partisan or religious agenda.

Unlike the demonstrators at Morsi’s days in power, they didn’t attack the presidential palace and didn’t constitute any physical threat to the army’s rule. The only threat from the demonstration was their moral claim to restore the democratically elected government. Their presence in the streets called off the army’s bluff as if it represents the Egyptian people. A-Sisi couldn’t stand the power of their words so he decided to drown their voices in the barrage of gunfire and rivers of blood.

Democracy is not a small thing, not a technical detail in the managing of the state apparatus. In all its forms Democracy is intended to represent the sovereignty of the people. The fact that the legitimacy for the state exists only as far as it serves the people. And the fact that the people themselves should decide by whom and how they should be served, not any Patron. Those Socialists that cite Marxism in order to dismiss Bourgeois Democracy ignore the basic fact that the Socialist criticism of it was based on the claim that Socialism will bring more democracy, not less of it.

The Arab Spring, like the Great French Revolution and all the great revolutions over the last 200 years were first and foremost about democracy. The rule of the people over the mechanisms of state power is inseparable from the right of the people to decent lives from all other aspects.

The Arab people will continue to struggle for freedom, democracy and social justice even in the face of the most murderous oppression. When one day democracy will be the only imaginable order of the day, all the tyrants will be seen as a remote nightmare and we will all thank those people that gave their lives in this holy struggle.

Israel

“The Israelis, whose military had close ties to General Sisi from his former post as head of military intelligence, were supporting the takeover as well. Western diplomats say that General Sisi and his circle appeared to be in heavy communication with Israeli colleagues, and the diplomats believed the Israelis were also undercutting the Western message by reassuring the Egyptians not to worry about American threats to cut off aid.

“Israeli officials deny having reassured Egypt about the aid, but acknowledge having lobbied Washington to protect it.

“When Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, proposed an amendment halting military aid to Egypt, the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee sent a letter to senators on July 31 opposing it, saying it “could increase instability in Egypt and undermine important U.S. interests and negatively impact our Israeli ally.” Statements from influential lawmakers echoed the letter, and the Senate defeated the measure, 86 to 13, later that day.”

It is still the same old story. In order to ensure Israel’s superiority in the region, Western powers are ready to support any murderous Arab tyrant… But this doesn’t reduce any millimeter from the value of Arab Democracy – it just says that the Arab will continue to pay a high price in the struggle for freedom and democracy as long as the racist colonization of Palestine continues to be the major aim of imperialist policy in the region.

The Military Coup that ended the rule of Mohammad Morsi, the first freely elected Egyptian President, is a most dangerous curve in the plot of the Arab Spring. Till now things were pretty clear. There were the forces of the old regime, resisting any democratic change in order to defend their privilege. On the other side there was a mass uprising with political forces of all colors calling for democracy.

Now, for the first time, the masses were split and many of the forces that participated in the revolutionary overthrow of the Mubarak dictatorship teamed with the forces of the old regime to dissolve all the democratic institutions, the fruits of the revolution.

This obliges us to ask some very hard questions: What is the revolution? What are its goals? Can it still succeed? What is the way forward now? Trying to give answers as major events still unfold is not easy, but as many essential truths are masked by the smoke of war we can from some distance at least resume some of the lost honor of truth and reality, if not full revolutionary perspective.

A Coup is a Coup

It is always good, even at the time of major setbacks, to notice and celebrate small victories. For me that fact that our enemy lies to himself is a victory, because living in a faked reality is the choice of the weak. So when the United States refused to call the Coup a Coup it proved again how hollow is its claim to sponsor democracy and freedom. But the sting came with the position of the African Union – which denounced the Coup and automatically suspended Egypt. It is part of the new world order, where the old imperialist powers prove to be what they are – the enemies of the people – while the emerging states of the third world are taking democracy more seriously.

The Coup and the Revolution

A coup and a revolution are not mutually exclusive “ideas” or types of activity. Actually in the first surge of the Egyptian revolution, in the beginning of 2011, after mass demonstrations have shaken the dictatorship, it was the heads of the army that staged a court-coup to dispose Mubarak in order to save as much as possible of the old regime.

In 2011 the coup was staged to dislodge a regime that was basically a military dictatorship. It was a clear step toward democracy and it was welcomed by everybody. Now the coup is designed to topple an elected president, after the dissolution of the first freely elected parliament and it suspended the democratically adopted constitution.

But, in a sign that Egypt has gone a long way with the revolution, the army, while taking power by force, swears its loyalty to the revolution and the Egyptian people. Unlike 2011, the army avoids taking direct power in its own hands but appoints a top judge, Adly Mansour, as civilian president – noting that the old regime’s judges were best at keeping their positions after the revolution and played a leading role in undermining the new democracy.

Actually the coup in Egypt was not possible without the cooperation and support of big part of the revolutionary forces. This blog made a point of characterizing the revolution not by a political or social agenda but as the active intervention of the masses to change the political order. Many Egyptian people celebrated the coup when it was announced, and many generally democratic and progressive people were rejoiced in the Arab world and beyond. But take care: In the politics of the coup, the alliance between the revolutionary forces and the remnants of the old order is not even an equal partnership. The masses were mobilized to legitimize the move but all the keys of control were given to the representatives of the old order – and it is not an issue of political beliefs but the vested interests of the classes that were (and still are) plundering Egypt and keeping it and its people in poverty, servitude and backwardness for decades.

The Egyptian Political Divide

It is very hard to count people in demonstrations. All estimations from the organizers, the media and the police are always politically biased. It is much easier to count votes – but revolution is a very fluid state with people’s opinions and affiliations changing fast.

An additional reason for the volatility of the Egyptian public scene is the political vacuum that was left by a long period of tyranny – when only very small elite had any experience of political struggle. Religious movements had the advantage of keeping the connection with the masses through activity in the mosques but no real experience in governance or coalition building.

In the first election after the revolution – the Parliamentary elections that took place between November 28, 2011 and January 11, 2012 – the Muslim Brothers came out as the biggest party with 37.5% of the votes. With the (even more Islamic) Nour party’s 27.8% they formed a clear majority in the elected assembly. The forces of the old regime were prevented from taking part.

When the second elections took place – this time for the presidency – in May and June 2012, the political picture already seemed much different. In the first round the Brotherhood came first with 25% of the vote. The clear representative of the old regime, Ahmed Shafik, that was now allowed in by Adly Mansour’s court, came a close second with almost 24%. Third place went to the mild leftist Hamadeen Sabahi with 21%. The next Islamic candidate came after him with 17%.

As a result the second round of the elections was a run-off between the Muslim Brothers’ Morsi and Shafik. Taking into account that all the other candidates were aligned with the revolution, you could expect Morsi to take over 70% of the vote. In the final count it was 51.73% for Morsi against 48.27% for Shafik.

Assuming that almost all the other Islamic vote went to Morsi, it means that the majority of secular pro-revolution voters preferred the clear representative of the old order over a Muslim Brother. And this was in 2012 before any of the true and alleged list of Morsi’s mistakes.

The Problem with the Brothers

At the beginning of the European Spring in 1848, Marx and Engels started “The Communist Manifesto” with the words: “A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism”. To much the same effect, the Arab World, still in the beginning of its spring, is haunted by the spectre of Islamism. Marx and Engels conclusion was that “It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.” The Muslim Brothers, shaped by decades of persecution, would generally prefer to talk less and do more.

When the Russian Revolution in 1917 started as a mass democratic and social protest movement and toppled the Tsar in February, the Bolsheviks were not the biggest party but they were the best organized and had a clear idea what they want to achieve. Lenin knew he had a short window of opportunity to take control before a new bourgeois political class will establish its rule. In the Bolshevik revolution of November 1917 he was fast to pass into law the “black distribution” – giving the poor peasants in every location the legitimacy of the revolution to independently take control of their land. Later the peasants fought to defend their land by saving the revolution.

The Brothers are the main organized party of the Arab revolution – but they are revolutionaries of a very different kind. If we judge by what they did when they had the chance to rule, they are trying not to rock the boat. They try to give assurances to imperialism. They think they can improve the economic situation simply by more honest, independent and professional management (which sounds likely, taking into account the wild corruption of the old regime). They try to neutralize the influence of the apparatus of the old regime by compromise and by democratic legitimacy.

This “we the good guys” approach to the democratic revolution faces several major obstacles, where every point of their strength becomes also a cause of vulnerability:

Their image as the inevitable winners of the Arab Spring tends to unite all other parties against them, or at least to limit their influence, even before they reach real power.

Their disciplined organization is feared by foes and allies alike.

Their reliance on religious ideology alienates people of other religions, adherents of other tendencies of Islam and an influential liberal middle class – leaving them to fight for an a priori limited support base and making coalition building harder.

Their remedy of gradual reform requires a long time and stable conditions to materialize. It proved a success in Turkey where a similar party took control in democratic elections in a relatively stable country. They seemed helpless and hapless in Egypt where they took control in the middle of political and economic crisis and where all other parties were unwilling to give them an opportunity to prove themselves.

Their readiness to play by the rules of formal democracy is not a good substitute to the more essential basic work of confidence building, networking, bringing together allies and solving problems with rivals.

In the end, the problem with the brothers is not that they don’t stand in my or your standards, but when they don’t stand by their own standards. The Brothers will usually avoid a fight if it is not likely to be an assured win.

In Egypt 2011 they declared that they wouldn’t put a candidate for the presidency – probably because they were aware that winning elections was much easier than governing and that they don’t have the material conditions for implementing their program in government.

Even at the last moment before this week’s military coup, according to the testimony of Yasser Al-Za’atra in Al-Jazeera, the Brothers’ leadership was aware to the preparations for military coup and preferred that Morsi will agree to a referendum about early elections, which will stay within the limits of the democratic game. In the end internal differences prevented this last moment attempt to avoid a clash.

The Revolution must continue!

The limits of the political leaderships are clear… The biggest responsibility rests with the Leftist and Liberal leaderships that play to the hands of the old regime. Now the Brothers justly feel cheated of legitimately won power and their first response is to show that they can’t easily be shoved off.

Still the revolution is much bigger and more important than any political leadership. It is the movement of the Egyptian people to control their own lives and to assure their dignity and social rights. In my view, with the lack of a Leninist leadership that can unite the masses around a clear goal, there is no alternative to the patient building of dialog and understanding between all the sections of society that are interested in a democratic future for Egypt.

As Israel is a military society, its jokes also come in Khaki. An infantry company was training in a remote area. They didn’t have a shower and couldn’t even change clothes. After a week of hard time in the sun, all the soldiers felt very uncomfortable. They could hardly stand quietly as the captain gathered them in the camp’s yard. As usual, he said he had two announcements for them, one good, one bad. The good one is that they will all change their underwear today. The bad one is that the men from platoon A will change their underwear with those from platoon B.
I didn’t expect much from the Israeli elections. All the Zionist parties share a wide consensus that starts with support for the 1948 ethnic cleansing and objection to the right of return of the Palestinians. All had spent quality time in consecutive governments, paying lips’ service to the famous Israeli longing for peace while robbing more Palestinian lands, building settlements and keeping a system of systematic racial discrimination.
Nor did the Israeli public, or anybody else in the world, expect much either. Actually the elections were called by prime minister Netanyahu as he felt that he was at the peak of his power, with no effective opposition, in order to perpetuate his tenure before Israel enters a period of economic hardship that may turn the public against him.
But where there is no hope or good guys, there is plenty of gloating glee.
First of all Netanyahu hardly got what he wanted. The height of his election campaign was the “Operation Pillar of Cloud” onslaught on Gaza, in November 2012, which ended with Palestinian rockets landing for the first time in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. He had to stop it abruptly after 7 days under Egyptian and American pressure. The result was almost total lifting of the prolonged siege of Gaza that Israel imposed in order to topple its elected Hamas government.
On the home front Netanyahu succeeded to dissolve the (mostly middle class) wide protest movement of summer 2011 with almost no concessions. Raising the prospects of War on Iran he thought he could play himself as the strong man and have Israelis jump to their customary subordinate pose.
It all backfired with the Netanyahu block (his Likud + Lieberman’s “Israel Beitenu”) losing much of its power in votes, MPS and political maneuvering space. As usual at the time of crisis and weakness, the party in government is paying the price of its impotence and is loosing credibility.
The second special reason for gloating is the disappearance from the public scene of Ehud Barak – one of Israel’s most blood thirsty generals… Once prime minister, he didn’t even dare to stand for elections. The other senior general, Sha’ul Mofaz, was leading Kadima, Israel’s biggest party in the last (2009) elections. He hardly squeezed in this time with 2.1% of the vote. The 2013 elections sign the big fall of the top brass from the heights of Israeli politics. The Israeli military had little to be proud about over the last years, so there is not much glory for the generals.
So who will be leading Israel over the next period? Its successful High-Tech elite shows no interest. They are trotting the globe, looking for exits, outsourcing and relocating. The Tycoons that live by monopolizing all the local resources and markets need the government – but they prefer to stay in the background, buy whatever politicians prove best at fooling the public. The Knesset is now full with establishment journalists, political and religious apparatchiks with the most viable lot being the settlers’ pogrom gangsters, now controlling about a third of the house.
Yet the real success story of the elections is Ya’ir Lapid’s “Yesh ‘Atid” (“There is a Future”) hot air balloon party, which came out of the nowhere to be the second biggest. The only thing that he states clearly is his desire to “divide the burden evenly” – i.e. to force Haredim (strongly religious) Jews and Palestinian Arabs to serve in the Israeli army. It shows at the same time how much the Israeli public, and especially the youth, is longing for change, on one hand, and to what extent this public has no real desire to change anything on the other. So they elected a brand new party with exactly the same policies…
The rest of cast makes farther wired laughing matter. Labor, led by Shelly Yekhimovitch, thought they got the magic formula of the 2011 “social protest” – warm hug to the settlers, ignoring the Palestinians and asking for “social justice”. Even talking about peace was irrelevant old staff. This promoted another last minute hot air balloon, Tsipi Livni’s “Tnu’a” (Movement), which advocated the “peace process” as a “niche market” and got its 5% of the vote.
“Meretz”, the Zionist “Left”, enjoyed this time the observed invulnerability of Netanyahu. It allowed its traditional supporters to vote for the party that express “their principles” and not crawling to the “center” to support candidates that may form an alternative government. Meretz doubled its share of the vote to 4.6%. But what those famous principles are? It is a long search we don’t have time to pursue now – in the last war on Gaza Meretz’ leadership didn’t find its supposed “principles” to oppose the war until it was over.

This blog, as explained elsewhere, advocates the boycott of the Israeli elections. The current “Jewish Majority” is based on the ethnic cleansing of the original Arab Palestinian population and on the disfranchising of the Arab Palestinian majority in Palestine. As long as you accept this framework, the discussion in the Knesset and its elections can only be about sharing the spoils of occupation and not about peace or justice.

The Boycott Campaign, now in the spirit of the Arab Spring, led by youth activists and using social media, was less organized but much more effective than ever before. The majority of the Arab public didn’t vote – even though we will never know the real numbers. Both the Arab Knesset parties and the Zionist establishment share the interest to hide the Boycott’s success. What is more important, a growing share of the Arab public is openly declaring its complete distrust of Israeli politics. A growing share of the real left and democratic activists in the Jewish society are now integrating into Palestinian politics, boycott included.

Like everybody talking about Israeli elections – I almost didn’t mention the Arab parties (and the Arab and Jewish Jabha Dimokratiya – Democratic Front) which received about the same results as last time… It is good for them. As I believe that many of their leaders, and most of their cadres, are really patriotic Palestinians, I don’t think they really belong to the Israeli Knesset. Throughout the years the Arab Palestinian public, with its boycotting and Knesset parties, shares the same struggles in the streets against the criminal oppressive laws that come from this hall of racist shame.
But now, in an effort to stem the flow of the public toward the boycott camp, some leaders of the Arab Knesset parties wanted to show that their participation in the Knesset can make a real difference. They blamed the Boycott campaign in preventing the toppling of the Netanyahu government. The only possible meaning of this position is that, if they had the votes to do it, they would support a government led by Lapid. Sorry, gentlemen’s, but by this reasoning you just prove how essential the boycott is. It shows that, even for good people like you, there is no practical politics in the Knesset other than supporting a government of occupation, settlements and racial discrimination.

As the Arabic saying goes, Egypt is the mother of the world (مصر أم الدنيا), or, at least, it stands at the center of the Arab World. So, when people in Egypt struggle to find the right direction for the Arab Spring, we, in Palestine, like Arab everywhere, have the feeling that this is an important struggle about our fate.

After a fast start in the beginning of 2011, the big Arab Democratic Revolution, which is what the Arab Spring is, is making slow and hardly won progress in its numerous fronts. The last confrontations in Egypt put to hard test even an addicted optimist like me.

When president Morsi was elected I wrote a special post to welcome his elections. I called on all the forces of the Egyptian revolution to work together to dismantle the old order and build a new system that will serve the Egyptian people. After Morsi’s constitutional amendments that gave his decisions immunity from the Judiciary, Egypt looked more divided than ever.

And it was a division along the wrong lines. The left and the nationalists made a common front with the remnants of the old regime. On the other side the Moslem Brothers closed ranks with the Salafists. For a moment it looked like Egypt is on the verge of war about the place of Islam in society, leaving aside the central issues of the revolution of Democracy and Social Justice.

In this war, like in any war, the truth is always one of the first victims. So I must remind that the Egypt’s Judiciary is mostly controlled by remnants of the old regime. It was subversive to the military junta that put sticks in the wheels of the revolution (and the democratic transformation). It even dissolved the first elected parliament, creating the power vacuum that converted president Morsi into the single source of democratic legitimacy.

But was not the new powers taken by Morsi converting him into a new Dictator? Egyptians have all the rights to beware any type of a new strongman. The main idea of the revolution is not to transfer power from one ruler to another, but to keep the power in the hands of the people.

The power of the people doesn’t come without internal contradictions. It can’t be expressed only by elections and representatives. The real power stays with the people only as long as they are ready to fight for it.

The Egyptian people were fighting in the streets on both sides of the last confrontation. The final result was the sum of their collective efforts. On one side Morsi’s “power grab” prevented the Judiciary from blocking the writing of the new constitution and throwing Egypt back to lack of any legitimate system. On the other side the street protests forced Morsi to give up his extra powers. The result was that all agreed to take part in the referendum about the proposed constitution.

The second and last round of vote in the referendum about Egypt’s proposed constitution will be held tomorrow, Saturday, 22.12.2012. I don’t know what will be the results of this referendum, but I can already say that the winners in the referendum are the Egyptian people.

If the majority votes to accept the proposed constitution, Egypt will have its first democratic constitution, won by revolutionary struggle and approved by democratic vote. It will establish the free Egyptian people as the source of legitimacy. Any deficiency in the constitution should later be amended by the same Egyptian people.

On the other side, if the constitution will be rejected it will also mean that the Egyptian people are exercising their right to decide their fate. They will continue their struggle for a better constitution, government, economic order and society.

With all the harsh words and violent eruptions of the last period in Egypt, I would suggest that we all take some historic perspective by comparing Egypt’s revolution to its predecessors like France 1789-99, Russia 1917 and Iran 1979. Two years on into these revolutions there was a bloody struggle that will make our Egyptian conflict look like a friendly conversation.

Still we can hope much more from our leaderships than avoiding killing each other. There is a lot of work to do to achieve the goals of the revolution. There is no way to do it without constructive discussion and cooperation.

Press Release

October 18, 2012

In fast response to the setting of the date of the Knesset elections to January 22, 2013, some of the youth activists published an invitation on Facebook and on Sunday October 14 there was a first meeting in Haifa Al-Ghad club. A group of activists gathered to discuss ways to mobilize for the boycott of the elections. They stressed the need to forward the boycott as an independent political alternative, as part of a political program of popular struggle outside the Parliament. This is in contrast to the claims of the parties that take part in the elections to the Zionist Knesset, which describe the boycott as avoidance of politics and isolation from the political struggle.

The participants in the meeting discussed their positions toward the Knesset and toward the participation in the elections. They agreed that the Knesset is not a real Parliament and that the election process in Israel is not a real democratic process. The Zionist movement, as a colonial settlements movement, established the state of Israel, the state of the “Jewish Majority”, by consciously promoting the forced migration and the denial of the Palestinian majority in its homeland by means of massacres, raising the specter of genocide, spreading terror and death. After achieving this, it acted to conceal the minority that remained in its homeland in the Diaspora of national denial. It all sums up to the political extermination of the Palestinian people. The Knesset is the source of legitimacy to these ethnic cleansing, occupation, oppression and racial discrimination. The permission that is given to some Palestinian Arabs to take part in the elections is designed to exploit them to strengthen the legitimacy of all these brutal practices, in order to convert the racist colonialist state, through their recognition, to “Jewish and Democratic”!!

The participants related to the experience of the previous elections and the popular boycott campaigns. They noted the public sympathy and the accumulation of awareness, which make the boycott position, to some extent, the majority position. The people are conscious to the alienation that they experience under Zionist rule. The participants defined, accordingly, the goals of the boycott campaign, including increasing the proportion of boycotters, and transforming the raw public feeling of distrust toward the Zionist state and its organs, and the sense of futility in the presence of the Arab MPS in the Knesset den, into a clearly expressed patriotic political position, and from it to advanced step in the struggle, which would express the unity of the struggle and the destiny of the Palestinian people.

The participants decided to appeal to the media not to marginalize the voice of the boycott, as this is the voice with the widest presence among the public. They decided to act to highlight the boycott position on all the stages where the elections are discussed.

They also called on all participants in the election campaign, the contesting parties and the boycott activists, to preserve the spirit of real democracy. This spirit is a basic requirement and necessity between our masses in their battle to stay on the land of the homeland, confronting the policies of the Zionist regime. They called for sticking to the debate about the real issues, in view of the service of the public interest, keeping away from defamation and cramping.

At the end of the meeting, an initiating committee was formed in order to communicate with supporters of the boycott across the country, with the aim of organizing the widest popular campaign for boycotting the Zionist Knesset elections

The Israeli Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, after failing to burn the whole region by dragging the imperialist powers into his “War On Iran”, has just called for a snap Knesset elections to be held on January 22, 2013. Nobody in Israel expects any good from these elections, except for Netanyahu himself that expects to ease his coalition’s internal problems. The issue of “peace” that used to be the great lie of Israeli politics will not even be mentioned.

The glorious Social “Tents” Movement that drew hundreds of thousands of Israelis to its demonstrations just a year ago will reveal that it didn’t only failed to gain any improvement in the government social policies, but it also failed to make any impact on the Israeli political map. Its youthful leader will have the dire choice between admitting the futility of the movement or joining as junior partners in the corrupt, anti-social Zionist faked “left”.

For the real left, which means the Palestinian Anti-Zionist left, the futility of the Knesset elections is no surprise.

In Palestine there are some 10 million people, living under the rule of Israeli Apartheid. About half of them are Palestinians. The real numbers are not available, as the distortion of statistics is part of the demographic war. Most of the Palestinians are denied the right to vote. There are more that 5 million Palestinians in the Diaspora. They were expelled from their homes in order to create the “Jewish Majority” that will give the Israeli state the false credentials as democracy. By denying their right of return the elected Israeli government decides their fate even more than it influences the current residents of Palestine.

We will not take part in this farce. We will not participate with the Zionist occupiers in “democratically” deciding the fate of the occupied and expelled Palestinians. In the last Knesset elections, the majority of those Palestinians that have the right to vote boycotted the elections. For the Anti Zionist Jews in Palestine this is the call of consciousness – don’t participate with the people of Kiryat Arba with “democratically” deciding the fate of Al-Halil.

We will not be part of the elections until it will be based on the simple democratic principle: “One Man – One Vote”, until this principle will include all the women and men of Palestine, including all of its refugees.

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The election of Muhammad Morsi from the Muslim Brotherhood as president of Egypt is a historic victory for the Arab Democratic Revolution. He should be welcomed and supported by all the progressive forces of the Egyptian people and by all the Arab people that are still struggling for liberation from imperialist domination and local tyrannies.

This election victory didn’t come easy.

First we should all remember, as President Morsi mentioned in his victory speech, that it is a victory that was paid for with the blood and souls of the Shuhada – the martyrs of the revolution.

The revolution in Egypt scored important victory with the toppling of Mubarak, but it was only a partial victory. The decision of the top brass of the Egyptian army to drop Mubarak, encouraged by their US mentors, saved a lot of blood and opened the way for the change of government and the installation of the new president by elections. But this decision was clearly motivated also by self interest – as the Mubarak area military and security establishment tries to keep as much as possible of their privilege and power at the expense of the Egyptian people. The Egyptian revolution is still not safe and still depends on the mobilization of the masses for any new progress against the forces of the old regime and against imperialist and Zionist pressures. This is just another reason why we should strengthen the hard-won victory in the presidential elections and build on it to continue the dismantling of the old regime, putting the Egyptian state at the service of its people and converting Egypt from a tool of Imperialist intervention to a bulwark of Arab liberation.

It was only natural that the brotherhoods’ candidate will come first in the first round of the presidential elections, on May 23-24. The brotherhood is the main organized force in the Arab Spring. It learned much of the revolutionary theory and tactics that the left and the nationalists have long forgot. It was more of a surprise that the representative of the old regime, Ahmad Shafiq, came second – but it stresses the fact that the revolution in Egypt didn’t reach all the people and all places yet, and the old regime still holds significant control on peoples’ lives and conduct. The gains of Hamdeen Sabahi, who came third, show that the left nationalist forces have an important base of support between the masses.

The real surprise, which should make all the forces of the Egyptian revolution reconsider their positions, is the results of the second round, on June 16-17, 2012. The fact that Mr. Morsi won by only a small margin, 51.7% to Shafiq’s 48.3%, means that the forces of the Egyptian revolution failed to unite when they faced a dangerous showdown with the old regime. It will not help if each party blames the others for this failure. The responsibility to create the necessary mutual faith, common program and unity in action is the common task of all forces that support the aspirations of the Egyptian people for freedom and social justice. After we were so close to failure, which could mean a setback for the revolution and, most probably, bloody repression and uphill struggle, all should work harder together to ensure the victory of the revolution in the coming challenging period.

Meanwhile we celebrate the victory of President Morsi as a victory of the Egyptian people and the Arab Spring. It starts a new tradition of changing governments by popular will, as expressed in free elections. The broad legitimacy of the newly elected president Morsi forms big cracks in the walls that all local dictators build around themselves to block the power of the people.

Many Palestinians are alienated by the Arab Spring. After so many years that Palestine was in the heart of the struggle between the Arab Nation and Imperialism, now the plight of the Palestinians seems dangerously out of the Arab and World focus. So, maybe, a new revelation may help to overcome, or at least ease, this alienation: The Arab Spring, like Jesus, Mother Mary, Ghassan Kanafani and Leila Khaled, was born in Palestine.

This is not common knowledge: Everybody will tell you that the Arab Spring started with the Tunisian Revolution, when Muhammad Bouazizi burned himself in Sidi Bouzid on December 17, 2010. But this is a narrow view of things. It is true that the first Arab dictator to fall was Tunisia’s Ben Ali, which fled the country by January 14, 2011. But the revolution is not only victories. If the revolution starts with the breaking of the fear barrier and the emergence of persistent mass demonstrations, undeterred by murderous oppression, then the Arab Spring actually started with the first Palestinian Intifada back in December 9, 1987.

The Palestinians never lacked the courage and the initiative to fight for their freedom. They are unfortunate to encounter a superior enemy: The colonialist fortress state of Israel, which is armed by the newest of imperialist armory to be foremost guarding post against Arab independence. But the hardship of victory doesn’t reduce the importance of the Palestinian revolution as the Vanguard of the Arab Revolution. On the contrary, the prolonged experience of the Palestinian chapter bears many lessons to learn from. This is another reason why it is important to see it in the true perspective – as part of the Arab Spring.

The first stage of the mass struggle, as in the case of the first Palestinian Intifada, is instigated by the unbearable oppression. But, not less important, is the perception that continuing struggle and sacrifices will lead to real achievements. The first intifada was based on the illusion that the independent Palestinian state (at least in the West Bank and Gaza) was “at the distance of a stone’s throw”.

The first stage of the Intifada was mostly peaceful, with mass demonstrations confronting army fortified posts. The logic of peaceful mass confrontation with an occupation army is to put political and moral pressure on the occupiers. After years in which the soldiers replied with live bullets to peaceful demonstrations, the price became unbearable. The Oslo agreement aborted any political pressure that was mounting on the occupiers and gave a breathing space to Israel to avoid even the limited Palestinian goal of an independent state in a small part of Palestine.

So, in another pattern that will be repeated in other scenes of the Arab Spring, the futility of a peaceful mass movement and consecutive massacres led to the Armed Intifada, the second intifada that erupted on September 2000.

This second intifada brought the first victory of the Arab Spring: The unconditional withdrawal of the Israeli occupying army from the Gaza strip in 2005. The Israeli army even took care to destroy all the illegal Zionist settlements in Gaza before its withdrawal. For the first time since the 1948 Nakba, part of Palestine was liberated from Zionism and placed under Palestinian rule.

In a pattern that was repeated later in other countries, this historic, though partial, victory was followed by more-or-less democratic elections. The elections, on January 25, 2006, were won by Hamas, the local branch of the Moslem Brotherhood. For the masses this choice was conceived as a rejection of the Oslo fraud, a vote for resistance to the occupation and for clean government as against the corruption of the Fatah’s previous Palestinian Authority government.

The experience of the last six years since the election of the Hamas government is full of confrontations, both with Israel and between the Palestinian factions, as well as political maneuvering, truces and unity agreements. Whoever thinks that the revolution is like a cheap novel, where everything ended with the elections and they lived happily (or frustrated) ever after, can learn a lot from the Palestinian experience. Any victory of the revolution only sets the stage and the conditions to the next scenes in the struggle.

Now that we know that the revolution in all the other countries is not easy to win, and not easy to carry on after the first victories, it becomes obvious that there are deep similarities between the trajectories of development of the Arab Revolution in all different countries.

The Palestinians were the first to start the Arab Spring, but they were (and are) unable to win by themselves. The Israeli army is built not only (or mainly) to oppress the Palestinians but to keep superiority over any possible challenge to Imperialist Hegemony in the region. The Israeli state strives by providing services to imperialism, for which it expropriates the Palestinian land, and not mainly by exploitation of the Palestinians. Actually, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is worse that Apartheid South Africa as its ultimate aim is to uproot and expel them and not merely to exploit them. If all the Palestinians stage a strike it is not much damage to the Israeli economy and may serve its purpose to marginalize them even farther.

The massive support that Israel receives from imperialism, militarily, economically and politically, is serving its patrons well by the huge profits that they (the imperialist states and companies) are gaining from their control of the Arab world. In short, the US pays Israel to beat the Arabs, which on their part pays the US to hold it back. This sort of “protection money” can be collected only so long as the Arabs are ready to pay for it. Breaking this evil chain is one of the main aims of the Arab Spring. The new independence of the Arab political decision, the new voice of the Arab people, will relieve the Palestinians from their hilarious isolation as the forgotten Vanguard of Arab Liberation. It will bring them back to where they wanted to be – as participants in the building of a free, democratic and prosperous Arab future.